PAINTING IN THE WIDENING GYRE
THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD
INthe 102 years since poet William Butler Yeats’ The Second Coming was first published, the world has been ravaged by war, widespread disease, and genocide, and it’s currently in the grip of a pandemic of global magnitude. Its onset came during one of the most divisive periods in U.S. political history. And on the eve of the presidential election in 2016, artist and poet Jane Shoenfeld had an uneasy feeling.
To paraphrase a line from Yeats’ poem, “Surely some revelation was at hand.”
“Yeats’ lines, ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,’ started voluntarily entering my mind,” she says. “That started a whole series of works based on phrases from that poem.”
As she worked, creating her abstract pastels on paper, she began chanting the lines from the poem.
“I would stand in front of the easel chanting ‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed.’ I had the experience that I was invoking something as I did the pieces. It had very much to do with the sound of the words and the meaning of the words.”
Shoenfeld’s pastel, The Center Cannot Hold (2021), is a non-objective abstraction. Cloud-like wisps of white, flashes of pale green, and ragged shapes of orange, red, and yellow swirl against a backdrop of deep blue and black, as though the Earth has been torn asunder.
It’s one of several works that convey, abstractly, Yeats’ dark vision. He wrote of a second coming, antithetical to the first, which was the coming of Jesus Christ. But Shoenfeld’s pastel could just as easily capture a sense of the lines of her own poem, The Chamisa is a Ghost with Pale green Wings, where, we read, a “ghost breeze blows, the wind swirls,” and later, “Dried leaves from last fall funnel into sky” and “We hear voices spiral.”
Paintings and Poetry: The Center Cannot Hold, an exhibition of works by Shoenfeld and Bill Sortino, opens on Thursday, Feb. 3, at the Visual Arts Gallery at the Santa Fe Community College. Both artists also wrote poems in concert with their studio practice.
“I’ve been writing poetry for years, but I’m not a professional poet,” says Sortino, who’s 79. “I started by putting it, a little bit, with my work. It was an opportunity to look at my work in a different way. Some of the poems I start first, and then I’ll make a painting, or I’ll make a painting and then write a poem, or the poem is coming to me as I’m painting. When I read the poems, I look at my work in sort of a different manner than I used to.”
The poems are displayed next to the 47 works in the show.
Shoenfeld, who’s 77, wrote her poems first and started painting in response to them, as well as to Yeats’ enduring classic.
Shoenfeld and Sortino worked independently. But since poetry was a foundational aspect of their current work, it seemed opportune to present their pieces together in an exhibition. They’ve known each other for more than 30 years.
“As I was moving into working more abstractly, I felt like ‘What am I doing?’ I called Bill and asked him to come to my studio, just to look at my work and talk about abstraction.”
Sortino mainly works in an abstract vein. The poetic component of his practice is part of a process he calls ekphrasis, which is a way of amplifying and expanding, through poetry, the meaning of a work of art.
“I contacted the gallery before the pandemic about having a show,” says Shoenfeld, a plein air painter, as well as a studio artist. “They said they would show my work, but it needs to be a two-person show. ‘We can fix you up with somebody.’ I said, ‘No. I know who I want to show with.’ And that was Bill.”
All of Sortino’s paintings on view were made over the course of two-and-a-half years, specifically for this show.
“The pandemic gave us an opportunity to produce a body of work,” he says. “In the beginning, I was rolling pretty well. By the middle to the end of 2020, I started slowing down with my work. It was just bogging down a bit. At the beginning of 2021, until probably June, I floundered on one piece for the longest time. Then, slowly, I got back into it.”
Both artists have pieces titled The Center Cannot Hold. Sortino’s painting, an acrylic on canvas, is also dominated by deep blues. Triangular shapes float in
this nebulous space, which is intercut with diagonal lines, lending the work a sense of fragmentation. Near the top center of the canvas, a cloudy shape appears. It seems, somehow, like an opening in the surrounding darkness, leading the eye deeper into the painting.
While you might think the artists are merely giving expression to feelings of doom and gloom, they find glimmers of hope within their artistic translation of The Second Coming — or at least in their own poems.
In Sortino’s poem displayed beside his painting The Center Cannot Hold, we read:
The center cannot hold.
Yet we must remember, a true spiritus mundi provides us with a center always rich in push and pull that cannot hold, it being an endless process of richness, supported by love.
“I see the Yeats poem as an expression of the collective unconscious,” Sortino says. “And that’s what I tried to express in my poem.”
In one of the pieces Shoenfeld did in response to Yeats, she couldn’t handle the darkness, she says. “I truncated his line ‘The ceremony of innocence is drowned.’ I just couldn’t deal with it. So I made a piece that’s just called The Ceremony of Innocence. So, you know, before it got drowned.”
Shoenfeld’s The Ceremony of Innocence is like the converse of what we see in her painting The Center Cannot Hold. In it, a globe, in soft shades of pink with patches of earthy green, appears like a small but welcoming world. However, two indeterminate shapes, rendered in shades of purple with hints of red, suggest that all is not right with this world. There is a growing darkness on the horizon.
In a way, Shoenfeld’s The Ceremony of Innocence reflects what Sortino wrote. It’s a center rich in push and pull that cannot hold. However, it’s comforting to remember that “the bigger picture,” suggested in The Second Coming, as well as in the paintings in this exhibition, is of the cyclical nature of life on a cosmic scale. The good always comes round again. ◀
details
▼ Paintings and Poetry: The Center Cannot Hold
▼ Visual Arts Gallery, Santa Fe Community College, 6401 Richards Ave., 505-428-1501, sfcc.edu/offices/visual-arts-gallery
▼ Reception 5 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 3; through Feb. 24
▼ Free “Poems from Paintings” workshop with poet Donald Levering
▼ 1 p.m. Feb. 11
▼ Masks and proof of vaccination required for the reception and
workshop. Masks required during the run of the show.